


Spread

by Nope



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-02
Updated: 2007-02-02
Packaged: 2018-11-02 22:46:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10954290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nope/pseuds/Nope
Summary: Owen woke up with wings.





	Spread

Owen woke up with wings.

It was a sign of how hung over he was that he actually failed to notice all through his breakfast (coffee), the morning news (the Brojin warp-ship incursion in Bute park had been blamed on a prank by Cardiff University students), and his shower (shampoo, rinse, slump under spray until the heat runs out).

"Well, fuck," he said, staring at the steamed-up bathroom mirror he'd half-wiped clean.

Theory one: alien STD. Problem: unlike Tosh and Jack (and maybe Ianto) he hadn't actually shagged an alien. At least not knowingly.

Theory two: alien device. Problem: he hadn't touched anything unknown weird-Science-y in months. At least not knowingly.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

They weren't bad as wings go. Nothing you could fly with, of course, probably a two-foot wing span at the very most, but they had a pretty pearly sheen to them and an eerie sort of grace once he worked out how to properly flex his shoulders to make them spread and close. Cartilaginous extensions of the scapula, perhaps, although he couldn't work out quite where the new muscles would be, or how the nerves tied into his spinal column and Jesus Christ why the hell hadn't he noticed the damn things growing? Where had the mass come from? How was this even, scientifically speaking, because he was a goddamn Doctor of medicine and biology and biochemistry and all that crap, probably the Earth's foremost expert on Xenobiology except for Captain Jack Fucking Harkness, and how the fuck was this even possible?!

Theory three: he'd gone stark bollocking insane.

The mirror had steamed up again. He wiped it clean again. He looked at his wings again.

"Fuck," he said again.

There was only one thing for it: have another drink. Except, as it turned out, he had no alcohol in the flat, and the effort of looking had made his head start pounding and his wings were tender and he'd just thought 'my wings are tender' so, really, it's not like the day could get any worse, which is how he found his mobile in his hand and Jack going "Owen? You were supposed to be in an hour ago!" in his ear.

"I have wings," Owen said.

"Paul McCartney is over-rated as a musician," Jack said, "but 'Band on the Run' was--"

"Jack. Jack. Jack!"

"--for its time and-- what?"

"Jack."

"Owen."

"I. Have. Fucking. Wings."

"I have a twelve inch wang, but you don't see me phoning people up to brag about it." There was a thoughtful pause. "Hang on, wait..."

"I'm not joking around here, Jack!" Owen yelled at the phone. "I woke up and I have fucking wings growing out of my fucking back, okay?! I have fat naked baby cherub wings on my--"

Beep beep, went the phone. Please recharge the battery now. Beep beep. I have died.

Owen said "fuck" again. It was rapidly becoming his favourite word. It was aptly suited to the moment and had a certain piquant joi de vive about it and by fuck did he need a drink. Just as soon as he went to work, beat the smirk off his bosses not-unattractive face, mainlined a bunch of drugs and had Ianto take his wings off with a bone-saw because, while the Welshman would probably enjoy it as much as the others, he was too rigorously polite to let on. Right. A plan.

All he had to do was cross Cardiff while having fucking wings.

Okay, okay. He could do this. He was a member of Torchwood and the first line of defence against all the nasties of space, time, and the universe. Ten minutes with a blow dryer got his wings dry but proved to be distractingly erotic so it was almost half-an-hour later that he was tucking them under the largest coat he owned -- a cheap-ass purple plastic mac he'd gotten free from somewhere and goddamn his taste for form fitting leather jackets -- whimpering a little every time they rubbed and cursing his fellow first line of defence for not bloody driving over here in the meantime. He was going to find someone to blame for this (i.e., not himself) and then he was going to get gratuitously hyper-violent on their guilty little asses, oh, yes. Papa's gonna spank. And not in the good way, either.

Driving turned out to be a worse nightmare than dressing and in the end he hand to push and tilt the seat as far as it would go, hunch forward over the steering wheel and keep one eye on the multiscanner so he could avoid traffic cameras and policemen who might have something to say about people who drive a ninety through central Cardiff without a seatbelt on. While having fucking wings, which Owen was so not getting over any time soon. And he really should have had something more than coffee because now his headache was clearing, he was suddenly ravenous. He could eat a bloody

Weevil. Weevil in the road. In the road right in front of his fucking car which was just fucking typical, really, none of this shit would happen if he was in bloody charge, thinking all this while whipping the car around, almost over-turning the damn thing, getting it back under control in a long slide that took five years off the wheels.

On the upside, he had gone flying to a very painful death through the windscreen into a Weevil stomach. He'd been bitten in that bloody cage and that one bite was enough, thanks. On the downside, the engine had stalled, there was no Weevil spray in the glove compartment, his gun only had a single clip, he couldn't see the Weevil anywhere, his fucking wings fucking hurt and he'd managed to bite the crap out of his lip doing that last manoeuvre. He flipped down the sunscreen to check himself in the mirror. Were his teeth getting bigger?

Also, there were three more Weevils right behind him.

Fuck you, Jack Harkness. And fuck your goddamn sense of humour. I wish Ianto's cyberchick had deleted you. Hell, I wish Ianto had shot you, maybe he'd stop fucking blubbering all the fucking time and will you fucking start you piece of shit car? Any time now. Come on, come on, oh, god, the Weevils were clawing at the doors, give it a bit of choke, come on, "come on!"

The back window smashed at the same time as the engine started and he stomped on the accelerator while firing two shots blindly behind him. Something squealed but Owen had no idea if it was the Weevil or the car. He tightened his grip on the wheel to keep his hands from shaking and tried to think. Weren't Weevils supposed to be nocturnal or something? He knew the ones they'd seen were all female, although you couldn't tell it to look at him. Crap, he just shot a girl, Gwen would have a fucking field day, he thought, and then the wheel buckled under his hands and he jerked back in surprise and this time he did roll the car, right over, roof now the floor he was smacking into.

The burst of pain from his crushed wings was like being hit with a taser about a thousand times over. He let out an undignified whimpering noise and twisted around as best he could in the cramped space, not so much relieving the pain as distracting himself with fresh new cuts from broken glass.

"Shatterproof windows, I tell them, but do they bloody listen?" He grumbled. "Do they arse." 

The close side windows were blocked by whatever the car had slid to a halt against, but the chair he'd tilted back earlier left him just enough room to pull himself towards the gaping hole that, pre-Weevil-shooting, had been the back window.

Owen remembered he'd dropped his gun at exactly the same moment that clawed hands reached in through that very same gap and yanked him clear out of the crashed vehicle. He yelled wordlessly, striking out blindly. A fist and his feet struck something and a moment later he was free, but it was a short respite. He landed on his back again, on his fucking wings, and screamed at the fresh burst of electric pain. His vision greyed out, came back blurry, rippled like heat haze. He could smell blood, realised it was probably his own, and gagged.

Another smell too. Like being in the cells late at night. Both sickly sweet and rotting, all at once. Weevil smell, all around him.

This was it, then. This is how it ended. Well, fuck, he'd been willing enough before. Even knowing what Suzie said, the endless living dark beyond. He could hack it. He was Doctor Owen Fucking Harper. He rolled over onto his front, pushed himself up to his knees. His back -- his wings were on fire. His stomach churned, some fucked up combination of nausea and hunger. Something roared nearby. Yeah, yeah. He was getting to that. Up from his knees to his feet and, oh, there you are, you fuckers. Come on then, my son. Come on you fucking pig-gators or whatever the fuck you were. Devolved humans. Evolved. What the fuck.

They did. He'd never seen this many Weevils in one place. Although, to be fair, he could be seeing triple for all he could tell, they all seemed to be shimmering, coloured auras, and there were stabbing pains where his wings were pressed urgently against the tatters of his coat and a numbness in his right leg which meant he'd got glass in somewhere dangerous but he wasn't going to look down to check. There were Weevils and he'd look the fuckers in the eyes before they took him

"DOWN!"

Jack?

Gunfire. Something ripped through his coat and self-preservation instinct took over, duck and cover. Jack, fucking glowing, what the hell?, striding into battle with his wee fucking gun, bit of reverse compensation going on there, and his Weevil spray. Tosh, too, and Ianto and Gwen and hey, hey, gang's all here, even the SUV with Torchwood on the side, good going, secret agency, whose bright idea was that? Jesus, he couldn't keep his mind still. Blood and smoke in the air. Fuck he was hungry. Adrenaline reaction. He knew all this. He was a fucking Doctor. He was smart. He knew shit. Glass on the floor, in his hand and it was too fucking easy to step around Jack and stab a missed Weevil with it, one swift sharp blow, right through the weak spot into what passed for their occipital lobe. A gush of something on his hands and bitey-boy went down. Oh, yeah. Owen had it going on.

Only the Weevils did too, and there was fuckloads of them now. Technical term that. It means 'fifteen more than the minimum it would take for them to kill you and all your friends'. 

He punched one in the face, almost experimentally, rather surprised when it staggered back and then, rather than coming for him, turned suddenly and leapt towards Ianto, who calmly shot it -- her, he remembered, they were all 'her's -- in the face with both barrels of a rather spiffy looking shotgun. Definite compensation there. More Weevils. Someone -- Gwen or Tosh by the size of the hand although he didn't see who -- pressed his gun into his hand, and he lifted it, squeezing off a shot with each breath out. Blam. Breathe. Blam. Breathe. Blam.

Breathe.

The gun clicked on empty.

Jack went down. Ianto.

The Weevils closed in.

Tosh screamed. Not Gwen, Gwen made entirely different sounds when she cried out.

Teeth. Claws. That fucking smell.

The gun clicked again.

He was on fire. Deep bone ache.

He tore the remains of his coat away, let the crush take them. Spread his wings. Closed his eyes and spread his arms too. Up, up and away, right?

Come on, you fuckers. Let's see the good Doctor fly.

Come on.

Nothing.

He cracked open an eye. There were the Weevils. All around him. Kneeling down all around him and fucking crooning like he was a goddamn concert or something.

"The fuck?" he said.

"Well, you don't see that every day," said Jack, sitting up, which was also a bit what-the-fuck-ish because Owen knew, knew damn it, knew he'd seen the man go down. Hell, he had Jack's blood on his skin, he could smell it. Which was new. He had a sudden horrible thought.

"Did you know about the wings?"

Jack met his gaze, giving nothing away, giving everything away by it. Ianto looked away. Tosh gave him the stricken puppy look. Gwen managed a sort of wet, sympathetic pity.

"You fuckers," Owen said. "You total, total--" Something important jumped up and down on his fore-brain until he noticed it. "Hang on, why aren't we being eaten? And why's it so warm all of ... sudden."

He twisted around to look over first one shoulder, then the other.

"The wings are glowing, aren't they? I'm a fucking Christmas tree decoration," Owen said. "Stick a fir tree up my ass and I'm done." He could see Gwen trying not to laugh. "What's with the wings, then? Come on."

"It's just a theory," Tosh said.

"Bollocks," he snapped, and she almost squeaked, shrinking back.

There was silence. 

Finally Gwen, trying for a sympathetic tone, started, "You know how you got bitten by that Weevil?"

"Yeah, I fucking noticed that, thanks."

"I think they're like bees. But in reverse," Tosh put in, science overcoming her reticence. "Bees use royal jelly to turn ordinary bees into queens. If the old queen dies, and the hive is threatened, they can create a new one."

"Only in the Weevil's case," Jack added, "the genders are reversed, possibly as a result of all the oestrogen in the water supply, but the end result seems to be the same. You're the leader now."

Owen considered this. He looked at Tosh. He looked at Jack. He looked at the rows of kneeling Weevils and took an experimental step forward. They shuffled just enough apart to let him through, crowding back around him as he passed by. When he stopped, they stopped, crooning again.

"So what you're saying is," Owen said carefully, "is that I am, not to put to fucking fine a point on it, the King of the fucking Weevils?"

"Yes," said Jack.

"And they'll do everything I say, without question," Owen said. "Like worker bees but bigger, yeah?"

"There seems to be some kind of low-grade tel-empathic connection, probably augmented with pheromone traces, although I'm getting some odd energy readings off-- I mean," Tosh interrupted herself, "yes. Probably. As far as I can tell."

"I had my suspicions since that fight club thing," Jack said.

"You knew," Owen said. "You all knew."

"I wanted to tell you," Gwen said, "I really did, but Jack was right. We didn't really know anything."

"Sorry," said Tosh quietly.

"You'll have to come back to the hub with us," Ianto said. His shotgun was in his hand. Jack's Webley was in his. They were scared. Owen could taste it on the air. Blood smell on Gwen. Timid little Tosh. When he closed his fists, his claws pressed against skin. His wings fluttered, waves of heat rushing through him. His stomach rumbled.

"Right," said Owen. "Okay."

The Weevils fell on his companions, tore them limb from limb in a single brutal, blood splash of a second, and presented Owen with their still bleeding torsos.

"It's good to be King," he said.

This time, he had a proper breakfast.


End file.
